Got the power bill today, and you'll never guess what happened.

Ok, maybe you will. I thought I was doing a pretty bad job at unplugging the router and stuff when not in use the past month, so I didn't think I'd beat my previous record of 114 KwH. But I guess I was doing better than I thought, 'cause the latest bill shows that I'm just 3 away from the magical double digits. That's 102 KwH for an entire month. According to some of the stuff I've read lately, that's what the average inefficient homeowner uses in just two or three days. I'm not sure what to expect from the next bill. I broke down and ran the dryer a couple times since the end of that billing period, but I was also out of town for 5 days at RailsConf, and unplugged just about every damn thing I could before I left, so... we'll have to wait and see.

Speaking of RailsConf, part of my motivation for setting up this blog was to occasionally talk about Rails, which I have yet to do, so, here goes.

Thanks to the day job for paying all the registration fees and travel expenses for RailsConf. Considering I work for a non-profit now (and my previous job at a much bigger company would have done no such thing), that's pretty fucking amazing. Since this was the first conference of this sort I've been to, I wasn't sure what to expect. I was just one among lots and lots of geeks, and that wasn't surprising. But I think I expected more of the presentations to be low level "Let's dissect some code together" kind of things, and some of them certainly were. But there were also a lot of high level theory presentations that weren't even Rails specific. So, I think that kind of disappointed me. But that just means if I go next year I'll be a more discriminating about which presentations I go to.

One of my favorite presentations though was Josh Sussers's presentation on contributing to Rails Source. I'll not bore anyone with the details, but Josh gave point by point directions to get started and made it seem very easy to take part (assuming you can code), with the hardest part being having the patience to wait for someone to review your submissions. I guess there's a backlog of hundreds of tickets and patches waiting to be reviewed. I managed to corner Josh at the final reception in the lobby and get some tips. His big suggestion was to find a submitted patch that didn't come with a test. Then, write a test case that proves the patch fixes something, and add that to the ticket. So, that night back at the hotel I figured I'd browse around the rails bug tracking site and see what I could find. Well, before I knew it, 7 minutes before midnight Pacific Time, I'd submitted my first patch to Rails Source. So, now the waiting game begins.

There was one more thing that surprised me at RailsConf... a marching band... or at least that's what they called themselves. Twasn't anything like the marching band I was in in High School.